Dancing Ba, one of the earliest viral videos in internet hory, is getting a new look

If you were born in the late 20th century, you may be aware of the Dancing Ba, also known as ‘the Oogachacka Ba’ – famous 3D-rendered animation of a ba dancing. Created Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and John Chadwick in 1996, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon and is believed to be one of the first viral videos in internet hory, long before the world defined such pictures and videos as ‘memes’.

And now, more than two decades after it first got popular, HFA-Studio will release a digitally restored, smooth high definition 1/1 artwork the original creators as NFT, “so the Dancing Ba can shake its hips forever”, the Vienna-based studio stated in a press release.

To give a makeover to the Dancing Ba, they “invited contemporary 3D arts and animators of another generation to ‘remix‘ the dancing ba. Arts and creators of the beginning of the = web3 re-imagine the loop with their tools, like the original creators did at the beginning of the idea of the web2″.

Attributing the popularity of the animation to “bizarre merged with innocence“, it added, “The original dancing ba recalls the initial excitement, optimism and playful creativity that gave birth to the web. It was a weird time for imagining hopeful visions of what the internet might become.”

While the e-mail chains and websites made the Dancing Ba animation spread like wildfire, its advent into the mainstream media had turned it into a cultural phenomenon in the late 90s. It appeared on TV shows like Ally McBeal and Simpsons, commercials for Blockbuster Video and Delta Airlines, Video Games like EA Sports’ FIFA 99 and Silent Hill 4 and even in Charli XCX’s and Troye Sivan’s 2018 music video for ‘1999‘.
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